Of course my comment was a bit sarcastic. Seriously.
What I meant was that it is very difficult to protect and claim ownership
for clear text file formats, like the Mathematica notebook format or the PDF
format. Evidently the Adobe people have understood that for their case. I
feel it a bit illogical to have a high price for the notebook editing part
(Mathematica) and a low part for the calculation engine (Player Pro), since
the notebook editing part to me seems as the simpler part. And I feel a bit
concerned: of course I would also prefer a Mathematica "free for all", but
at the same time I would like the Wolfram people well paid and working,
improving their product further.
Hopefully Wolfram finds some new business concept to make the money roll in.
Maybe they could sell Mathematica as engine for more specialized products?
There are some indications that they are thinking this way. Then they would
benefit from having as many Mathematica developers as possible in the
community of Mathematica users. Maybe it is up to us Mathematica enthusiasts
to show the world why we are enthusiastic to create resources to make
Mathematica free.
Ingolf Dahl
> -----Original Message-----
> From: AES [mailto:siegman at stanford.edu]
> Sent: den 21 april 2008 09:21
> To: mathgroup at smc.vnet.net
> Subject: [mg87931] Re: Player Pro and Packages
>
> In article <fu4fnb$nkc$1 at smc.vnet.net>,
> "Ingolf Dahl" <ingolf.dahl at telia.com> wrote:
>
>
> > Maybe Wolfram should ask Adobe for an advice, how to ensure that
> > behind the content created for Adobe Reader is a genuine
> Adobe Acrobat
> > license. The problems involved seem to be quite equivalent. ;-)
>
> I do hope this comment was sarcastic or sardonic, rather than serious?
>
> Is not the great virtue of PDF that it's a more or less fully
> _open_, fully specified, and widely distributed format or
> standard, made openly available by Adobe so that anyone with
> adequate coding skills can create documents or display
> documents in that format _without_ having an Adobe license at
> either end.
>
> I understand that Adobe does retain some kind of ownership
> over it, and they certainly sell tools that third parties can
> purchase to create or read PDFS. And, there are security
> links and password protections that document creators can put
> into PDF documents to limit what recipients can do with a document.
>
> But my understanding was that the second paragraph above was
> nonetheless more or less true (except for some unfortunate
> garbage related to embedded fonts). Is this not the case?
>
>